Dear Dr. Howard Van Till,
I read your exchange with Paul Nelson, a friend of mine, in Zygon
recently.
How frustrating! Paul kept trying to drag you over his side of the line as
an
"intelligent design" theorist, by widening that definition humongously to
include
anybody who believes that God is behind it all. And you kept trying to
remind Paul
that "intelligent design" theory does not consist primarily of such a
humungously
wide definition, but is concerned mainly with far narrower ideas, like
ignoring
possible natural causes from the Big Bang on, ignoring natural causes that
may
be inherent in nature, in favor of the belief that God had to keep dipping
his finger
into creation, tilting things this way and that, time and again, in order
to get them
to work right.
Honestly, will Paul never learn? Can't he HEAR what you're saying?
According to what Paul has told me and in his contribution to the book,
THREE
VIEW OF CREATION, Paul no longer even bothers to QUESTION his young-earth
views!
He in fact, freely admits that the evidence APPEARS to favor an old earth.
Here's how he maintains his cognitive dissonance: Paul believes that the
resurrection
of Christ is an historical fact, and argues that IF a man can indeed rise
from the dead,
as he believes can be proven historically (sic), THEN anything can happen,
even a
whole cosmos that appears by all the scientific evidence to be ancient, can
be
very very young. So, via a theological bridge of "logic" hanging by mere
skyhooks,
Paul skips past all the hard scientific work that would normally be deemed
necessary in order to discredit the scientific evidence for the earth's
vast age,
and continues in the blindest vainest vein of theological thought since
William Jennings
Bryan's arguments against evolution.
Best, Ed
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